How to Be Alive: A Guide to the Kind of Happiness That Helps the World

363 Pages·2016·2.13 MB·English

by  Colin Beavan

Dedication
For the little girl—rapidly becoming
young woman—who has taught me how to love.
I am so, so proud of you. My daughter,
Isabella Conlin Beavan
Epigraph
Likewise, helping oneself and helping others
Are like the two wings of a bird.
—ZEN MASTER WON HYO
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: What Kind of Life Do You Want?
PART I: THE NEW FACTS OF LIFE
1 The Awful Stories We Tell Ourselves to Make Ourselves Small
2 Understanding the Truth of Your Relationship to the World
3 The Lifequester’s Mind Hacks
4 The Unifying Theory of Changing Your Life and Your World
PART II: HOW TO WANT WHAT YOU REALLY WANT
5 The Coolest Part of Being a Lifequester
6 What Are People For?
7 How to Know How Many Regrets You Will Have on Your Deathbed
8 What Science Says About Where You Will Actually Find Purpose and
Meaning
9 Why Most of Humanity Seems to Be Headed Straight Toward Those
Deathbed Regrets and How to Change Course
10 A Last Word on Why the World Would Be Safer and Happier If We
Wanted What We Really Want
PART III: THE GENTLE PATH
11 A Journey of a Thousand Miles, Etc., Etc.
12 Identifying the Easy Parts
13 Eat How You Want to Live
14 Own What Really Makes You Happy
15 How to Get Around and Where to Stay Put
16 How to Become a True Citizen
PART IV: FINDING YOUR PEOPLE
17 The “Real” Thing in Relationships
18 When the Black Sheep Finds Its Flock
19 Success in Everything That Matters
20 Build It as You Like It
PART V: WHO TO PARENT
21 The Many Ways of Parenting (Including Not Having Kids)
22 Some Reasons People Do and Don’t Have Children
23 Parenting Other People’s Children (and Letting Others Parent Yours)
24 Deciding Whether to Be a Bio Parent
PART VI: WALK YOUR PATH
25 Learn to Discern
26 How Can I Help?
27 The Life of Your Time
28 Thriving in Your Corral
29 Building a Corral Where You Live
PART VII: RISE ABOVE THE NOISE
30 What It’s Like to Be Human
31 The Freedom of No Escape
32 The Science of Truth
Epilogue: The Last Word
Resources: How to Join the Ongoing Conversation and Get the How to Be
Alive Workbook
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Also by Colin Beavan
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
WHAT KIND OF LIFE DO YOU WANT?
The End of the World as We Know It and the Amazing Opportunities That
Follow
Climate-change-induced superstorms that have killed many thousands and put
tens of thousands out of their homes. An economy that seems permanently too
weak and stingy to offer dependable jobs. Social and racial inequality filling the
news and making us feel we are going backwards. A world political system that
is too broken, deadlocked and corrupted by money to deal with any of it.
Everything seems so suddenly unstable.
We can all choose to live in fear about that. Or, we can look to a new set of
aspirations and life choices that many people are already finding exciting and
inspiring.
I don’t mean the problems and the suffering are exciting, of course. I mean
the opportunities are. Because as things shift, you (and I and everyone else) have
the opportunity to make new choices and build new lives where you not only get
to feel secure and enjoy your life but also get the chance to contribute to
solutions that help other people, and feel like your life really means something in
the process.
That’s what this book is about—the quest for a joyous and meaningful life
while living in a frightening, confusing world that needs our help. I know such a
life is possible because, as I’ll explain shortly, I’ve somewhat famously begun to
experience it myself, and I’ve seen it in many thousands of others.
But first, listen:
It used to be that you had to follow a very specific path to get what you were
supposed to want. Now, a college education no longer guarantees a corporate
job, and a corporate job no longer guarantees health care. Even “securing” your
retirement may seem like a pipe dream.
Meanwhile, a lot of us who do manage to “get ahead” can’t stop feeling a
sense of futility. We sit in our cubicles all day tapping at our keyboards while
not using the talents we prize in ourselves. Not only do we not believe in the
missions of the companies we work for, but we often find ourselves willfully
ignoring the harm our employers cause. We can’t escape the nagging feeling that
our “success” comes at the expense of the rest of the world.
The standard approaches to life no longer lead where so many of us actually
want to go—not when it comes to feeling as though we’re helping with world
problems and not when it comes to having secure and meaningful lives of our
own.
Which leads us back to the exciting parts—the opportunities.
The first exciting part is this: since fitting into societal molds no longer pays
off in the ways it traditionally did, we are freer to stop forcing ourselves into
those molds. With fewer so-called rewards to supposedly miss out on, we have
less to lose if we break away from the societal directions people traditionally
follow and much to gain by experimenting with life choices that are actually
truer to our values, our passions, and our world concerns.
The second exciting part is that in this time of numerous crises, how we
choose to live can truly make a difference in the world. Back when the world
was stable, it felt unchangeable. What impact could one person have? Now the
world is a changing and fluid place.
Each of us is like a butterfly whose wing flaps could start a hurricane. A
world with many ills needs many different kinds of doctors—many different
kinds of people with many different kinds of talents and passions and
personalities. We all have the chance to matter in an entirely new way.
The third exciting part is that we don’t have to embark on this quest for the
happy, impactful, values-based life alone, nor do we have to figure out the quest
entirely for ourselves. It is true that our culture constantly nudges us toward the
work-to-spend treadmill that so many of us want to escape. There is still no
societal pathway to the authentic, meaningful, service-and passion-oriented life.
But it is also true that there is already a growing national and international
movement of people breaking away from those old broken paths and laying
down new ones. They are questing for and finding new ways of making life
choices—in careers, in what they do with their money, in their living situations
and lifestyles, in how they eat and travel, and in all the many other ways we
relate to each other.
As fate would have it, I became a well-known figure in this movement of
seekers back in 2007, when I launched a one-year lifestyle experiment in
environmental living. It was in many ways the climax of my lifelong quest to
find a fulfilling, meaningful, happy life that helped others and was in line with
my values. This year-long project became the subject of an autobiographical
book and a documentary film, both titled No Impact Man.
The book has been translated into thirteen languages and is required reading
on hundreds of college campuses. The Sundance-selected film has been screened
in cinemas and broadcast by television networks around the world. Most
important, this project, book, film, and the work that has evolved from my
experience since have put me in touch with literally tens of thousands of seekers
who are on the quest for a better way of life.
I’ve met and given talks to thousands of people who are creating their own
new ways of relating to the society we live in. They are making lives that are
better for themselves, better for their communities, and better for the world.
You’ll find some of their stories and much of their wisdom in the pages of this
book.
The world needs entrepreneurs who use business as a tool for increasing
happiness. It needs activists who speak with love instead of fear and anger. It
needs gardeners and local farmers who care for the land. It needs a whole
different kind of bankers and politicians who care more about communities than
corporations. It also needs more musicians on the subway platforms and artists
on the streets to bring us joy in these difficult times. The world needs so much. It
needs all of us.
Which is not to say this is a job or career book, because it’s not. Thinking
that careers and jobs are the only way to security and meaning and helping the
world is another of those standard life approaches we need to move away from.
How we work matters, yes, but so do how we make friends, have families, think
about possessions, run our homes, live in our communities, engage as citizens,
have sex, relate to children, and on and on.
In this book, we are going to discuss the choices that will help us build great
lives—not just great careers—based on who each of us really is, what we really
care about, and what we most want to help with in the world. It is a book about
asking the questions that will nudge you along a path to your own personal
version of the Good Life. A life where your happiness and safety come not at the
expense of the world but as the result of doing good for the world.
That idea, by the way, is what distinguishes this book from most other self-
help books and why, as we will discuss later, I actually think of it less as a self-
help book and more as an each-other help book. There is a multitude of books
about the world’s problems. And there is a multitude of books about how to try
to extract a happy life from that world. What’s missing are the books about
fixing our lives in ways that fix the world and fixing the world in ways that fix
our lives. That’s what this book is about.
More About How I Came to Write This Book and How You Can Use It to Claim
Your Own Version of a Cool, Fun, Meaningful Twenty-First-Century Life
On the door to the dressing room is a big star with my name on it, something I
thought only happened in movies. Inside, I’m sitting on a couch. Now standing
up. Now sitting. Now standing. I’m so nervous. I’ve already been on Good
Morning America and many other shows, but the host of this show is one of the
fastest wits on television. Going on camera with him is like throwing yourself
under a rhetorical bulldozer—in front of a few million people.
I’ve already been to hair and makeup, where they found a way to eliminate
the circles under my eyes. Now a woman with a clipboard arrives. She suddenly
freezes as she listens to something in her headset. “Yes . . . Yes . . . I’m with
him.” She looks at me. “Come this way please, Mr. Beavan.”
We walk down a hallway and a door opens to the studio. We pass what look
like bleachers, where the studio audience is sitting. A comedian is warming them
up and they are all laughing. I step up onto the stage and suddenly I am seated
across a desk from Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report.
This makes the first of what would ultimately be two appearances on the
show. Apparently, despite Colbert’s false conservative persona, he is a fan of No
Impact Man and my work in lifestyle redesign.
I’m sitting up there onstage when, suddenly, the comedian who has been
warming up Colbert’s audience finishes and exits. The APPLAUSE sign is blinking
over the audience. The little light above the camera lens has turned green.
Colbert is introducing me. He jokes in his deadpan way, “By not poisoning the
earth, he is poisoning our capitalist society.”
God help me.
Before the No Impact Man project, I had tried so hard to get happiness in all the
ways we are told will bring it: job searches, career “hacks,” romantic
relationships, following gurus, “attracting my vision,” living in this city, living
in that city, traveling, working full-time, working part-time, and so on.